AutomateIt: Creating agile infrastructure through server automation

Excerpt

AutomateIt is an open source tool for automating the setup and maintenance of UNIX-like servers, applications and their dependencies. Compared to cfengine and Puppet, AutomateIt is easier to work with, more powerful, and uses syntax that will be immediately familiar to anyone that's written a shell script. AutomateIt's author, Igal Koshevoy, is a veteran software engineer and systems administrator that's managed hundreds of servers at a time and has over a decade of automation experience working with companies like Intel, Oracle, and many startups. He'll discuss how to effectively use server automation, and demonstrate how to use AutomateIt's features, along with code samples, that address real world automation needs.

Description

Concepts

What is server automation and how does it help create valuable, flexible infrastructure?

What is agile infrastructure and what edge does it give sysadmins, developers and business staff?

What is AutomateIt and what does it automate?

What is different about AutomateIt’s approach that make it simpler and more powerful than cfengine and Puppet?

Projects: Organize recipes and related files. Expose variables and features through the project environment. Use fields to extract configuration variables. Use tags to conditionally execute recipes based on servers’ roles and OSes. Distribute and apply recipes to many servers.

Sessions

Configuration management tools are finally coming into their own. Powerful, automated infrastructure management is now available in a wide variety of open source tools. Tools written in different languages, using varying operational methodologies and embracing differing philosophies. Come meet some of the creators and maintainers of these cutting edge tools like cfengine, Puppet, AutomateIT, Chef, and bcfg2 and quiz them in the why and hows of their tools and the philosophies behind them.

Code sprints are events where developers quickly complete coding tasks in a collaborative environment. A panel of skilled developers will share their experiences for organizing effective code sprints so you can better participate and organize your own. The panel members have organized and participated in over a hundred sprints (ranging from Django to JRuby) and used sprints as the primary way to develop community-oriented projects (e.g., Calagator). While most of the discussion will be about volunteer-run open source code sprints, many of the ideas will be readily applicable to improving development at your workplace. The panel will offer practical, actionable advice that you can use and answer your questions.

OpenConferenceWare is the application running this site. The software is themeable, customizable and open sourced: anyone can use it to run their own conference site. OpenConferenceWare’s developers would like to talk with users about making the software better, organizers about using it for other events, and with those interested in joining the development team.